Security restrictions won't allow the applet to read from other sites, so that could be causing the problem, even though you are using localhost. The movie and applet will need to be on the same server, which you should then be using open file instead anyway.

I am not very sure whether my problem is yet clear to you.
Let me try to explain once again.

My ultimate goal is to write an applet that can play a MPEG-4 movie.
The movie will reside on the same http server where the applet resides(For initial development, the HTTP server is on my local machine).

After adding any of these plugins, the JMF studio on my machine can now play any MPEG-4 movie residing in my machine using file protocol. But it can't play the same movie using http protocol. This inability to play movie over HTTP is documented for some JMF plugins also.

Now I want to know whether there is any JMF plugin that supports it.
Or is there any other way out?

But the clients aren't the ones opening the file, the applet is. And as far as the applet is concern, those are just local files. How the user connects to the player should make no difference on how the applet loads the file.

I was just browsing around when I saw this. Sorry jyotirmoy, I don't have an answer for you. All I can say from my own experience is that your problem might not be file vs HTTP, but one of a Java Application vs an Applet. An Applet doesn't have the same permissions that an application does, and near as I can tell sometimes hunts for classes in different places than your classpath. I don't know much about JMF, but it sounds like either a class is unavailable to the applet or a registration file is misset.

Anyway, what prompted me to post is a correction to Phaelax's statement.. an Applet runs on the user's machine, not the server. Therefore, the Applet sees things much as the client does, and must connect via a network protocol like HTTP. If the applet tries to reference c:\my_file.avi, it won't get my_file.avi from the server, it will try to get it from the client's hard drive (and promptly suffer a security violation exception for trying to do something illegal).